Kiss River
He would wait awhile before getting up. Maybe Gina would be gone by then and he wouldn’t have to look at her long hair and dark eyes and faintly pointed chin across the table from him over his bowl of cold cereal.
Sasha, though, was not going to cooperate. He jumped from the bed and began whining at the door, which was colored green and blue from sunlight pouring through the stained-glass panel in the window. Sasha’s handsome brown eyes pleaded with his master. No choice now. Clay had to get up and let him out.
“Hold on just a minute, boy,” he said as he dressed. Sasha sat down by the door, eyeing him patiently, his tail thumping against the old wooden floor.
He made Sasha wait another minute while he used the bathroom and brushed his teeth, then he followed the dog downstairs.
The kitchen smelled of good coffee, homemade waffles and the yeasty aroma of rising bread. He could see the bowl of dough on the counter, covered with a dish towel. Lacey made whole wheat bread every other week, just as their mother had. Right now, she was seated at the table across from Gina, the steaming waffle iron next to her plate.
“Huckleberry waffles,” Lacey said, looking at him, and he knew she had been up early, picking the huckleberries from the bushes at the edge of the woods and kneading her bread dough.
Gina glanced up at him. “They’re delicious,” she said, reaching for the syrup with the slender ruby-ringed hand that had touched him in his sleep. She had the phone book open on the table next to her plate, her finger marking her place on one of the yellow pages. The portable phone rested next to the book, and her large, heavy camera hung around her neck.
He merely nodded at the women as he walked outside with Sasha. Standing on the porch, he breathed in the already hot morning air as the Lab ran off to the woods. Sasha reappeared, running across the sandy yard, then leaping up the porch steps with one wild jump before stopping short in front of the screen door. He sat down, as he’d been trained to do, turning his head to look at his master, waiting for him to enter the kitchen first. Sasha knew very well the pecking order in this house.
Lacey already had Sasha’s food in the bowl, and the dog dived into it with gusto.
Gina laughed. “I’ve never seen a dog eat like that,” she said.
“Do you have a dog?” Clay poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down across from her. He reached for the handle on the waffle iron and looked at his sister. “Is this ready yet?” he asked.
“Wait till the steam stops.” Lacey put a plate in front of him and sat down again herself.
“When I was a kid,” Gina said. “I don’t have one now. I work long hours, so it wouldn’t be fair.”
Clay opened the waffle iron and used his fork to extract the berry-marbled waffle from the grill. “What are you looking for in the phone book?” he asked.
“A room,” she said. “I tried a couple of places already, but no luck. I thought I’d try this place next.” She looked down at the book. “Suiter’s Inn.”
“No, not that one,” Clay said.
“Is that the one near Shorty’s Grill?” Lacey asked him, and he nodded. “It’s a bit seedy, Gina. You shouldn’t stay there.”
“I can’t pay a lot,” Gina said, her finger still on the page in the phone book. “I might have to settle for something a little less luxurious than the Ritz.”
“What area do you want to be in?” Clay asked.
Gina shrugged. “Near Kiss River, I guess. But anyplace on the northern part of the Outer Banks would do.”
“Maybe there’s a cottage available,” Clay said. “Maybe someone had to cancel their reservation at the last minute. That happens. Then you’d have something for a week or two. How long were you planning to stay?”
“No more than that,” she said.
“I’ll try Nola,” Lacey said, reaching across the table for the phone.
“Who’s Nola?” Gina asked.
“An old family friend,” Lacey said, dialing. “She’s also a Realtor and she’d be able to find out what’s available.”
Gina and Clay ate quietly while Lacey spoke with Nola. She pulled the phone book toward her to write a few notes in the margin of the page, but from the conversation, Clay could tell that the news was not good. Lacey hung up the phone and wrinkled her freckled nose at their guest.
“She could only find one cottage available,” she said, reading from her notes. “It’s soundside in Duck and it’s sixteen hundred dollars a week.”
Gina shook her head. “I can’t do it, then,” she said. “But if I can’t find something here, maybe there’d be a room available on the other side of that long bridge. That would be close enough, and—”
“Stay here,” Clay said, the words surprising him as they slipped out of his mouth. He didn’t need to look at Lacey to know she was astonished by the invitation, but he also knew she wouldn’t mind. She’d probably been thinking the same thing herself, but had been afraid to suggest it because of how he might react. “You can rent the room you’re in for a hundred a week,” he said.
“I … I …” Gina stammered. “That’s so nice of you.” She looked at Lacey. “Are you sure that’s all right with you? Do you two want to talk it over in private, or—”
“It’s great with me,” Lacey interrupted her.
“You have to charge more than that, though,” Gina said. “I’m not that broke. I can—”
“It’s a token amount,” Clay said. “We’ll put it into the keeper’s house conservation fund.” He was aware he was not acting rationally, but he hadn’t felt rational in a long, long time.
“Well, thanks,” Gina said. Her hand shook a bit as she lifted her glass of orange juice to her lips. She took a sip, then set it down again. “That’s a huge relief to me. I really appreciate it.”
“No problem,” Clay said. He extracted another waffle from the iron and offered it to Gina, but she shook her head again. He put it on his own plate, then poured more batter into the grill.
“Do you mind a check from my bank in Bellingham?” Gina asked. “Or I could get some money from an ATM and—”
“A check is fine,” Clay said.
Gina sat back from the table, finished with her breakfast but not with conversation. “I thought I would call your father today, and see if I could talk to him about raising the lens.” She looked at him, then Lacey. “It’s been ten years, right? Maybe he and the other people who objected to raising it ten years ago have mellowed about the idea by now.”
“You’re talking about our father,” Clay said with a halfhearted laugh. “Mellow, he ain’t.”
“You’re a fine one to talk,” Lacey said. “You’re exactly like him.”
He couldn’t argue with her. As much as Lacey looked like their mother, he resembled Alec O’Neill. So much so, that when one of the old-timers spotted him and Lacey together in the grocery store a few weeks ago, he’d thought they were Alec and Annie. It had taken them quite a while to convince him of the truth. And although Clay didn’t like to admit it, he was no more mellow than their father. He had both Alec’s wiry build and the bundled, hyper sort of energy that accompanied it.
“Dad’s off this afternoon,” Lacey said. “I think you should just go to his house and talk to him.”
“Call first, though,” Clay said.
“I don’t think she should call,” Lacey said, her tone more pondering than argumentative. “He might just blow her off if she calls.”
“He can blow her off just as easily at his front door,” Clay argued. His father would be kind about it, but it was doubtful he’d have any interest in talking to anyone about the Kiss River light.
Gina followed their conversation as if watching a Ping-Pong match.
“Well, we can call him, then,” Lacey said.
“No, no.” Gina held up a hand. “You two have done too much already. Let me take care of this on my own. Okay?” She looked at each of them in turn, and they nodded. “Can you give me his address and phone number?” she asked.
Lacey stood and walked over to one of the kitchen drawers, then returned to the table with a notepad. In her seat again, she jotted down the address. “I’d go with you,” she said, “but today I have two kids to tutor, a three-hour shift on the crisis hot line and an appointment to donate blood at two-thirty. Not to mention bread to bake.”
Gina stared at her. “I thought today was your day off?”
Lacey dismissed her question with a wave of her hand. “It’s all fun for me,” she said.
“Where do you do your stained glass?” Gina asked.
“I share a studio in Kill Devil Hills,” she said. “But I do some work here, too, in the sunroom.” She pushed the pad across the table to Gina. “His house is on the sound in Sanderling.” Pointing to the camera hanging around Gina’s neck, she added, “You know, he used to take pictures constantly of the lighthouse. He’ll have a thousand for you to look at if you ask him.”
“What sort of pictures?” Gina looked intrigued.
“You name it, he has it. It used to be all he ever did. Drove me nuts.” Lacey shuddered at the memory.
“He’s still consumed with photography,” Clay said.
“Yeah, but now he just takes pictures of his kids,” Lacey said. “At least that’s normal.”
“His kids?” Gina asked. “You mean, you two?”
“No. He’s remarried.” Lacey hopped up again and reached for her purse where it sat on the counter by the door. Clay knew she was going after her wallet and the pictures of Jack and Maggie. She held them out for Gina to see. “He started over again. This is Jack. He’s ten. And that’s Maggie. She’s eight.”
“What beautiful children,” Gina seemed genuinely interested. It was, Clay knew, a womanly skill. She looked up at him. “They both look like you, Clay.”
Clay and Lacey laughed. “They both look like Olivia, our stepmom, actually,” Lacey said. “Jack isn’t even my dad’s son.”
And Lacey was not even her dad’s daughter, Clay thought. Lacey didn’t share that little detail with people quickly or easily, though, and he thought he knew the reason why: it made their mother look bad.
“Jack’s from Olivia’s first marriage,” Lacey continued. “But my dad adopted him.”
“Ah,” Gina said, touching the pictures with the tip of her finger. “Do you see them much?”
“We do things with them all the time,” Lacey said. “They’re the cutest kids.”
Clay felt antsy. The last thing he wanted was to get into a conversation about marriage and relationships. He stood up, and Sasha immediately ran to the door.
“Taking Sasha for a walk,” he said. “Then I’m going to work on the cistern. Gina, holler if you need anything.”
Chapter Six
ALEC O’NEILL PULLED THE BEDROOM SHADES against the midday view of the sound and lit the five jasmine-scented candles Olivia had set on the dresser. From the corners of the room, Bocelli sang in wistful Italian, and Alec was pleased he’d finally had the speakers repaired. He and Olivia had sold their separate homes and moved into the house on the sound when they were married nine years earlier, and the bedroom speakers had never worked. Clay fixed them just last month after Alec had mentioned their useless existence, and now he knew what he and Olivia had been missing. If they’d had Bocelli singing in their bedroom all these years, who knows how often they would have gotten around to making love?
He could feel Olivia’s presence behind him as he lit the last of the candles in the stained-glass holders Lacey had given them years ago. Olivia was already in their bed, already naked, having nearly torn her clothes off as she walked from the living room to the bedroom. She’d made him laugh, as she often did. An impatient lover. He could barely remember a time she’d held off long enough to actually let him be the one to undress her. Her eagerness this afternoon only made him take his time with the candle, pretending he could not get it lit, because he liked teasing her.
“Alec, don’t worry about the candle,” she said from the bed.
“Got it,” he said, blowing out the match.
It had been, what? Two weeks? Maybe longer. When you had kids, it was sometimes impossible to carve out time together. That’s why he had rushed home after his morning appointments at the animal hospital and why Olivia had swapped her day off with one of the other docs at the E.R. Jack and Maggie were at day camp, and now he and Olivia had a couple of hours free for lovemaking.
He walked toward her, pulling off his T-shirt. Olivia’s arms were folded beneath her head and her eyes were on his, a small smile on her lips. She was the sort of woman who became more beautiful with the years. He liked the laugh lines at the corners of her eyes. Her hair was still the same soft brown it had been when he first met her, although now the color came from a bottle. He would have been equally as happy if she’d let it go gray, but at nearly fifty and with two young kids, she feared looking more like their grandmother than their mother, so he understood. His own hair was more gray than black now, and he still felt an occasional jolt when he looked in the mirror, expecting to see the dark hair he’d once possessed. He still felt like that younger man inside. Most of the time, anyway.
He began to unbuckle the belt on his jeans, but Olivia stretched an arm toward him.
“Come here,” she said. “Let me do that.”
He lay down next to her, and she kissed him, her hand freeing the end of his belt from the buckle just as the doorbell rang. Olivia’s fingers froze, and she groaned, burying her head in his shoulder with a laugh.
“Let’s ignore it.” He pressed his hand over hers where it rested on the snap of his jeans.
Olivia nodded in agreement, then unsnapped his jeans and curled her fingers beneath the waistband. The bell rang again.
“What if it has something to do with the kids?” she asked, leaning away from him. Her pretty, green eyes were wide open, the desire that had been in them only a moment earlier already gone. She was mother now, all of a sudden. Not wife. Not lover. She would not be able to ignore the bell.
He nodded and sat up, pulling on his shirt. He knew she was right. Their house stood alone, at the tail end of a small, out-of-the-way road that ended at the edge of the water. No one came out here unless they had a real purpose.
He bent over to kiss Olivia’s temple, then walked out of the room, buckling his pants. The bell was ringing again by the time he reached the living room, and he opened the door to find a young woman standing on the wooden front porch.
“Yes?” He tried to place her. Some of his patients occasionally brought their sick pets to him when he was off, and he didn’t always recognize them out of the context of his office, but he doubted he’d ever seen this woman before. He would remember her if he had. She was in her late twenties or early thirties, with long, very dark hair, milky-white skin and eyes the color of charcoal. In short, the sort of woman you could not see once and then forget.
“Are you Dr. O’Neill?” she asked. She was wearing dark-blue shorts and a light-blue shirt, open, over a white top of some sort.
“Yes,” he said.
“I’m Gina Higgins, a friend of your son and daughter’s.”
With his mind already on Jack and Maggie, his heart did a nervous little dance in his chest until he realized she was probably not talking about his two youngest children. “Oh,” he said. “Do you mean Clay and Lacey?”
She nodded. “That’s right,” she said with a smile. “I should have made that clear. I forgot you have younger children.”
He felt awkward, if not downright rude, standing in the doorway without inviting her in, but this did not appear to be an emergency, and he was anxious to get back to Olivia. “What can I do for you?” he asked.
“I was wondering … May I come in for a moment?” She looked past him into the living room. “Is this a good time?”
“Actually, it’s not,” Alec said, but Olivia walked into the room in her khaki shorts and white shirt, and he figured there was nothing to get back to, at least not at that moment. He opened the door wider. “It’s fine,” he relented, stepping back to let her walk past him into the living room. She was wearing a green backpack. “Olivia,” he said, “this is Gina Higgins. Right?” He looked at Gina to check his memory.
“Right.” She held out her hand to Olivia, who shook it, smiling her usual gracious smile.
“Gina’s a friend of Lacey and Clay’s,” Alec explained.
“It feels so good in here,” Gina said, taking in a deep breath and smoothing her dark hair back from her damp forehead. “The air conditioner’s broken in my car.”
“Have a seat, Gina.” Olivia motioned toward the sofa. “Can I get you something to drink?”
Gina sat down, slipping her backpack from her shoulders to her lap. “No, thank you. I don’t want to take that much of your time.” She looked up at Alec, who was still standing in the middle of the room. “Lacey and Clay suggested I talk to you,” she said. “I’m a lighthouse historian in the Pacific Northwest. I came to the Outer Banks to do some exploration of the Kiss River light. I hadn’t realized that it had been demolished.”
Alec felt his smile freeze at the mention of the lighthouse. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Olivia lower herself to the other side of the sofa, and he knew she was watching him, waiting for his reaction to this news. He rarely thought about the lighthouse anymore. His long-ago fight to save it had been misguided and had sapped far too much of his time and energy. It had been part of his crazy grieving process after Annie died. “All grieving seems crazy,” Olivia had comforted him, but he knew he’d gone a bit over the edge.
He sat down on the arm of the upholstered chair near the door and studied their guest. It seemed odd that a lighthouse historian would not have known that the Kiss River light was no longer standing. “I’m surprised you didn’t know it had been damaged,” he said.
“Well—” Gina smiled “—my focus has been on the West Coast. And I’m just an amateur at this. I’m really a schoolteacher, and I only get to pursue my lighthouse passion in the summer. I admit I didn’t do my research very well, did I?” She was clearly nervous. Her hands clutched the backpack in her lap as she leaned forward on the sofa, and her smile had a shiver to it. He felt some sympathy for her. “I was using an older lighthouse guide because it’s a favorite of mine,” she continued, “and I popped out here, expecting the light to be just as it was described in the book.”
“That must have been upsetting,” Olivia said.
“There are several other lighthouses here for you to explore,” Alec suggested.
She shook her head quickly. “I’m into preservation,” she said. “And I was very upset to realize that not only had the lighthouse been destroyed, but that no one has ever tried to retrieve the Fresnel lens from the ocean.”
“That’s an issue that was put to rest a long time ago,” Alec said, wishing he could put it to rest in this room as well.
“I know.” She rubbed her palms over her backpack. “I wanted to see if I might be able to do something about that.”
“About raising the lens?” Olivia asked.
Gina nodded. “Yes. I’d like to see it on display somewhere.”
Alec did not understand why someone from the Pacific Northwest would give a hoot about the Kiss River light, and her intrusion into something that really did not concern her annoyed him. As a lighthouse historian, though, amateur or not, she had to know that the lens was very rare. Only two of them still existed in North Carolina, and they were valued at over a million dollars apiece. He was suddenly suspicious of her motives.
He folded his arms across his chest. “The first thing for you to realize is that it’s unlikely the lens is still in one piece.”
“I know that,” she said.
“And second, the lens would be government property, no matter who salvaged it. You wouldn’t get any money out of raising it.”
She looked stricken, and he knew he had offended her.
“I’m not after money,” she said. “I just want to see it displayed appropriately for the public to enjoy. I was hoping you might be able to help me make that happen.”
“I’m not the right person to help you with this, Gina,” he said, shaking his head. Again, he was aware of his wife’s eyes on him. She was a quiet, but hardly disinterested, observer.
“Lacey and Clay said you used to be the head of the Save the Lighthouse committee,” she said.
“That’s true, but that was a long time ago and I’ve since changed my allegiance. Now I just want to let things stay the way they are.” The eldest of their three cats, a Persian named Sylvie, stole into the room and hopped up on Olivia’s lap. Gina reached over to scratch the cat’s head.
“Are there other people who were on the committee with you who might still want to see the lens salvaged?” she asked, her eyes on Sylvie.
Alec sighed. He wanted her to go. Wanted to get back to bed with his wife. But there were other people who might be willing to help her, and in the interest of fair play, he thought she should have those names. He could see the determination in her eyes and knew she would dig them up anyway, with or without his help. “There’s Nola Dillard,” he said.
“Oh. The real estate agent, right?” Gina pulled a pad and pen from her backpack and wrote down the name.
“Yes.”
“Where can I find her?”
“She has her own company now,” Olivia said. “It’s on Croatan Highway in Kitty Hawk around milepost four.”
“What’s the name of the highway again?” Gina asked.
Olivia spelled the word for her. Croatan was the common name for Highway 12, the main road through the Outer Banks. Gina was showing her outsider status in more ways than one.
“And who else?” She looked across the room at him.
“Walter Liscott and Brian Cass are the other two,” he said. “They’re getting up there in years, though, and spend their days playing chess at Shorty’s Grill and not doing much else.”
“That’s on the beach road in Kitty Hawk,” Olivia volunteered.
“They’re not going to be up for much of a fight these days,” Alec said, although he knew both men would probably love to raise that lens as their final tribute to the Kiss River light.
“Well, I can talk to them about it,” Gina said, writing on her notepad.
“The only other person on the committee was another woman, Sondra Clarke,” Alec said, “but she got married and moved away a few years ago.” There had been one other person on the committee—Olivia’s first husband, Paul—but his work for the committee had not been born of a sincere effort to save the lighthouse. Besides, he lived in Maryland.
Gina nodded. “Well, I’m grateful to you for giving me the names,” she said.
“You know—” Alec shifted his weight on the arm of the chair “—I hate to see you waste your time with this. It’d be better spent on some other project.”
“This particular project is important to me,” Gina said. Something in her voice reminded him of himself back when he’d fought to save the lighthouse, and he wondered if she, too, was being driven by more than the mere salvage of bricks and glass.
“How do you know Clay and Lacey?” Olivia asked her. She had her legs tucked under her on the sofa now, as if expecting Gina’s visit to last a long time.
“I was looking at the lighthouse, and Clay came out of the keeper’s house and we started talking. He and Lacey offered to let me rent one of the rooms in the house for a little while. It was so kind of them.”
Lacey had been the one to invite her to stay, almost certainly. His daughter would take in any stray she could find, while Clay would barely notice his or her existence. It had bothered Alec when Clay and Lacey moved into the keeper’s house in January. He hadn’t been back there in nearly a decade, and he’d had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach the first time he’d driven to Kiss River to visit them. That storm should have taken the entire Kiss River promontory, in his opinion.
“How long are you staying?” Olivia asked their visitor.
“I’m not sure yet,” Gina said. “At least a week. Maybe longer.”
“Do you know that Monday is Lacey’s birthday?” Olivia asked, and Alec knew the question was as much to remind him as it was to inform Gina. He didn’t need the reminder, though. He had forgotten Lacey’s birthday once, long ago. He would never make that mistake again.